Be a Responsible Designer, Make Your Web Design Responsive!

Just when you thought that designing a website was the terminal step to a major accomplishment, brace yourself for a reality check. Every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website too! One for BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle, you name it, they want it.

This is where the idea of Responsive Web Design (RWD) swoops in. It is essentially a newfound web design approach, where the main focus is to provide an optimal viewing experience. This involves easy reading, navigation, panning, and scrolling, be it on your phone or your desktop. As tedious as that sounds, it is actually quite easy to implement, if one keeps in mind a few strategies which pave the way for a responsive web application.

1.Fluid Grids: The enormous number of screen resolutions present in today’s market can be quite intimidating, when it comes to designing a layout based on rigid pixels. Fluid grids go a few steps beyond the traditional layout and make sure that when a layout is squeezed onto a mobile device or stretched across a huge screen, all the elements in the layout resize themselves in relation to one another.

2.Break Points: A break point is essentially a point where the layout and styles change, based on how the content fits the screen-size. By deciding on where to place your breakpoints, you can effortlessly make your page adapt to different layouts.

3.Adding Viewports: The viewport indicates to the browser that the page needs to be scaled to fit the screen, thus making it one of the most critical component needed to originate multi-device experiences.

4.Media Queries: Media queries are simple filters that can make it easy to change styles based on the characteristics of the device, including the display type, width, height, orientation and even resolution. Perhapsthe only case where a query proves to be your answer!

5.Style Guide: Compiling a style guide is a useful way to not only achieve an in-depth understanding of the visual representation of your webpage but also helps ensure consistency throughout the design.

6.Stylistic images: These are images which are not needed as part of the core content but add visual flare or help guide the user’s attention to a specific piece of content.

7.Constraining the maximum width of the design: You need to constrain the maximum width of the screen so that the text and paragraphs don’t turn into into one long, single line on ultra-wide screens.

8.Tables: What if we have content which shouldn’t alter dimensions? This is where tables come in handy. Once you make sure that you incorporate tables properly, you can keep your optimized mobile experience intact.

9.Alter the padding and reduce text size: We can enhance the size and weight of the typography of a web design, to increase the readability of the content. Not only that, it is also possible to alter the padding to make distinct areas stand out more.

10.Tile the Images: The images on mobile device interface are set to be the full width of the screen and stacked vertically. However, this does not scale well on a wide viewport, such as that of a laptop screen. To make the images look correct on a wide viewport, they can be scaled to 30% of the container width and laid out horizontally.

Looking at the speed with which responsive web designing is taking over, it wont be long before what we now call “Responsive Web Design” will simply be called “Web Design.”